Contact centers can provide numerous services to customers, and have been doing so for years. The idea of a contact center queue is not much different from that of standing in line at a bank and waiting to be helped by the next available teller. However, there can be a lot of frustration if the first, second, or even third teller cannot answer a given question or set of questions. The same frustrations have been known to occur in contact centers. A company can gain customer satisfaction if they are able to answer their customers' questions quickly and accurately.
Contact centers, such as Automatic Call Distribution or ACD systems, are employed by many enterprises to service customer contacts. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming contacts.
As products and problems become more complex and diverse in nature, a single agent often no longer has all of the skills, expertise, or availability to fully service customer contacts. To service customer contacts more effectively, contact centers route contacts to one or more resources with specific skills and attributes. These attributes and/or skills may include but are not limited to proficiency in spoken languages, technical expertise, communication ability (e.g., sign language, TTY, texting, SMS, email, phone, video phone, and the like), preferred work type, and combinations thereof. For example, contact centers that handle computer customer service may have application resources, hardware resources, operating system resources, network resources, etc. While these resources may be well-qualified to answer questions on their particular subject(s), they are often unqualified to answer questions involving subjects outside of their respective skill sets. Still, these resources may be assigned to work items based on at least one attribute, skill, and rule-based match used by a contact center's work assignment mechanism.
It is one goal of a contact center to maintain good customer service when handling contacts, and as such, work items are typically assigned to qualified agents in a timely and efficient manner. Many contact centers utilize an IVR system to determine information (e.g., attributes, historical data, etc.) associated with a contact that may be used in assigning the work items. However, since the IVR system is typically used as a gatekeeper to the contact center, informational messages must be transmitted to and from the IVR system to facilitate accurate work assignments. As can be appreciated, the large number of messages sent and received via the IVR system can cause a strain on the valuable processing resources of a contact center.